AI meets the Department Of Government Efficiency

I have a reflexive skepticism about fads. While AI isn’t exactly a fad, the relentless promotion by the media of an AI future certainly looks faddish to me. 

That said, there’s no question that AI is making inroads into data analysis. Watson can already read radiological images more accurately than trained radiologists. AI is transforming warehouse management.

Over at her blog “Eating Policy,” Jennifer Pahlka has a post on the role AI is likely to play in the execution of the Musk/Ramaswami DOGE project to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. 

“The reality is that in many domains, the regulatory and spending complexity is such that it’s very hard for anyone to know what’s going on. You might think it’s Congress’s job to understand how the laws they’ve written have been operationalized, but that’s one of their chief complaints — that they don’t really understand what happens within the agency and they don’t always think it's consistent with their intentions. And the agencies themselves are dealing with the accretive nature of what comes down from Congress — new laws naturally reference and amend old laws, creating one confusing web of language. Then there’s the web of the regulations previous staff have written, not to mention the policies, forms, and processes that have been born from those regulations that seem to carry the weight of the law but are really somewhat arbitrary expressions of one way they could be operationalized. It becomes hard to sort out what cannot be changed without an act of Congress from what would need a new rule (and therefore a rulemaking process) from what could entirely legally be modified if only Bob over in compliance would stop threatening to call the Inspector General.”

 

Elon is probably already on this, training AI to parse what is regulatory law from what is merely current practice:

“Imagine DOGE walking into agencies on January 21st and not having to say [“show me where it says we can’t do this”] four times a day. If they’re building good AI models (and, let’s hope, testing them), they’re not going to ask that at all. They’re going to know what’s legal and what’s not, or at least think they’ll know. (It’s all always open to interpretation.) Right there, the wall I talked about on Friday is immediately pierced. It’s not so much an information asymmetry we’ll be looking at, but an asymmetry of understanding, and of confidence (merited or not) in their ability to act, and act fast.”

Congress is not ready to rebut this challenge or to respond in a timely fashion by creating law to back its intentions. 

“Most commentary on DOGE has pitted it against the agencies it has vowed to drastically cut, but Congress is going to want to have a say in what they propose to do — and of course, the executive branch is legally bound to spend what Congress has appropriated, though the Trump administration has signaled an interest in challenging (or ignoring) the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 which, according to a statement from the Democrats in the House Committee on Budget, “established procedures to prevent the President and other government officials from unilaterally substituting their own funding decisions for those of the Congress.” In other words, if the budget passed by Congress says we’re spending this, we’re spending this, DOGE or Trump be damned.”

Of course, the GOP Congress can’t even pass a continuing resolution these days. This ain’t your father’s budget process, peeps.

https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/um-congress-you-might-want-to-take?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2164237&post_id=153392122&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=2133ns&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email